In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reunion as Pilgrimage Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in. Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man” Most of us have been away from Greenwood now for forty, fifty, sixty years, or more, reside in various places throughout the United States and abroad, and perhaps have no real desire to return to this place as permanent residents. The question so often posed by outlanders who wish to make our acquaintance is, “Where is home?” We respond with a question intended to make a clarifying distinction: “Do you mean where I now live, or where I’m from?” To make the distinction between where one lives and where one calls home is not to quibble over semantics . To the “where I’m from” question, I and so many other schoolmates refer to this town at the eastern edge of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta named for the Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore. The matter of where I’m from strikes at the very core of who I am as an individual and as a member of a particular community . Although education, family, work, and other circumstances have taken me to other places, I still see Greenwood and the Delta as home. It’s not so much a matter of whether I was treated well or ill there, it’s more a matter of finding a locus for my own personal and communal story that is at stake. Where I’m from, therefore, has everything to do with who I am now and what prospects my future holds—even, and perhaps especially, if it has served as my primary motivation for rising beyond those prospects bequeathed at birth. Reunion as Pilgrimage 198 For me, then, the Delta is a sacred place—a notion at which some might bristle. But the graduates of Stone Street, Broad Street, and Threadgill High Schools who return there for the class reunion every odd year during the week of the Fourth of July or the following week understand this to be the case. Class reunions, whether for high school or college, are, of course, periodic rites that take place throughout the nation, perhaps even throughout the world. But it seems to me that the reunion that happens in the Mississippi Delta every couple of years holds significance beyond the average class reunion. In the first place, it very well may be the best modern example of the need and obligation to return to a special place or home—a defining characteristic of both traditional and modern societies. Those of us who return become part of a pilgrimage to a sacred place that held some important meaning in the beginning, when we were young and starting out in life. The biennial pilgrimage to Greenwood is an effort to take hold of one’s story and find meaning among others similarly situated. Most of my classmates may wish to stop short of seeing it the way I do—as a deeply spiritual act. They may simply see it as a way of meeting old friends and talking about old times, but there is a reason that the meetings and associations reenergize and restore us individually and as members of a community. If we consider some of the most sacred places throughout the world, such as Jerusalem, Mecca, Delphi, or the Black Hills, we know that on certain occasions they seem to acquire even greater sacredness. It’s not when we visit them as single individuals on a sightseeing trip; it is rather when we go as part of a community, as pilgrims among other pilgrims taking part in special ceremonies , that we enter them as holy places. I visited Nigeria in 2001 along with several colleagues from the University of Tennessee. One of the highlights of the trip was a festival held at Ile-Ife about eighty miles or so from where we were staying in Lagos. The Yoruba see this place as sacred because it is the home of their ancestors and, they claim, the home of humankind in general. For those outside the Yoruba community, it was just another beautiful festival with great food and drink. But for the Yoruba and those blacks who could trace their lineage back to them, it took on a much greater significance that was partly captured in their warm greeting, “Welcome home.” Now, perhaps such a large claim shouldn’t be made for the reunions in Greenwood, but it does strike me...

Share